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Design Review: Volume 5, Issue 3 (July-August 1953)

Editorial

Editorial

Recently much has been written and many views expressed on the subject of high building costs. To all who go to make up that substantial proportion of our population who are unsuitably housed, the topic is an absorbing one; to the young family man the matter is one of vital concern, and small prospect of improvement in the situation has been offered. Old converted houses, although something of a national asset in times of housing shortages, have been “home” to too many growing families for too long, but high rentals and living costs make the task of saving enough to bridge the gap between loan monies and the price of a house and section, lengthy and difficult.

From this situation one supremely significant fact emerges. Today the building industry as a whole is critically short of labour. At the same time the industry is geared to produce a type of house which is traditional in regard to planning, construction, and materials. This type was developed when labour was plentiful and cheap and many present-day machines and equipment were unheard of. But because the industry is at present organised to produce this traditional house it can do so more cheaply than other types which theoretically should be less costly. Public demand is therefore for the traditional house, lending institutions naturally prefer it, and both State and private builders continue to produce it. Thus a complete circle is described which is heartbreakingly tight and proverbially vicious.

How can this circle be broken? Isolated attempts by the more progressive architects to develop new house types, although perhaps suggesting a more rational approach to the problem have not been successful in practice because with a traditionally trained labour force any variations from standard practice tend to increase costs. On a national basis the solution surely is in the hands of the building industry itself. What is urgently needed is an organisation set up by the industry, staffed by research technicians and designers, and backed by an adequate publicity department. Such an organisation if maintained on a broad enough basis could surely evolve a new type of house in which modern planning and machine techniques are fully utilised and man hours in construction are reduced to an absolute minimum— a house in which standards of a different but not inferior … kind are introduced. The training of key men in the labour force would also have to be the responsibility of the organisation and the new dwellings would have to be presented to the public by the publicity department in the way that Detroit announces a new automobile.

Dare we suggest that the new dwelling type might prove to be, not the isolated single house, but one of a group of perhaps four or six, each with its own private garden? And constructed, perhaps, from timber pre-cut in a mobile workshop on the site?

Is it beyond the bounds of possibility that a Building and Research Authority could be set up?

Building contractors, material suppliers, hardware merchants, sub-contractors, lending institutions, architects, local authorities, the Government, and the general public are all concerned, and the national interest would be well served if differences were settled and full support offered to such a project.

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